Video: Understanding Smart Blur

We took a look at Smart Blur earlier as it exists in the Underpainting palette, but in Painter 12 they've actually brought this out as its own filter outside of Underpainting. And I just want to explain a little bit more in depth exactly what it's useful for. And it's really a simple filter, you'll find it under Focus, it's right here at the top, Smart Blur, and we can kind of move this out of the way as we work.

Join John Derry, one of the original Corel Painter authors, as he shares the creative techniques that will get beginners up and running, and shows old hands the new features that can get a creative vision out of your head and on to your canvas. The course demonstrates how to create projects, use Painter brushes and painting styles, build templates, and work with layers and channels. John also shares pointers on setting up a Wacom tablet to interface with Painter.

Topics include:

Exploring the changes in the Painter 12 interface

Customizing brushes and selecting painting styles

Laying out the optimal workspace

Controlling color with the color palettes

Adjusting brush size and stroke attributes

Working with texture-aware media

Quick cloning with the Clone Source panel

Auto-Painting with the Underpainting, Smart Stroke, and Restoration palettes

Understanding Smart Blur

We took a look at Smart Blur earlier as it exists in the Underpainting palette,but in Painter 12 they've actually brought this out as its own filter outside of Underpainting.And I just want to explain a little bit more in depth exactly what it's useful for.And it's really a simple filter, you'll find it under Focus, it's right here atthe top, Smart Blur, and we can kind of move this out of the way as we work.

What it does is it basically looks at and analyzes an image, finds edges, orareas of high contrast and protects them.And then areas that are not high contrast, it softens.So an ideal area of high contrast would be this flower up against these darkerelements. And an area of low contrast would be like in here, except for wherethis frog happens to be I guess.There's not much change going on in here.So, that area doesn't have a lot of dramatic change in it, and so Smart Blurwill affect those areas much more than it's going to areas that have highcontrast boundaries associated with them.

And when you start to use it, even at a low-level, I'll just take it up here alittle bit, there we go. You can see now this doesn't seem very affected at all,whereas this already is starting to get softened out.And the more you turn this up, the more aggressive its action is.So as I keep going up here, see that by this point it's already starting to looka bit like a painting.Because, one concept that I sometimes try to get across is, you can look at anyvisual information and it can be looked at as a set of frequencies.

High-frequency information is sharp detail, grain, edges; those are all part ofthe domain of frequency that is high-frequency.Then you get down to where things don't change very often and that's where youhave low frequencies.And what's happening here is, as we continue to increase this, we areremoving the high frequencies from the image and one reason this looks morelike a painting than a photograph is because photographs have a lot ofhigh frequency detail in it.

And when we use a filter like Smart Blur, that intelligently protects high-frequencyand removes low-frequency detail, well we are kind of draining this image ofsome of its photographic nature. And you crank it all the way up and it getsvery simplified, and yet all of the hard edges within it remain.You've got this environment where you've still got sharp edges, but now a lot ofit is very simplified down.So, you can still read this as reflections and this as lily pads on a pond, butit's a little bit more for the reader to kind of connect the dots to figure outthat image. It's getting a little bit more abstract, whereas you know, now I canstart to take it down, I can start to play with it for my taste, you know, what mayconstitutes a nice balance between both.

So Smart Blur really gives you a very nice tool for initially draining aphotograph of its high-frequency information.And I just want to show you this too, you can repeatedly apply this.So if I take this up all the way and apply it, okay that's pretty simple.Now let's go back to Effects, we'll reapply it, and let's even go, well a thirdtime, let's see what happens.So each time, it's applying it more and more and you can see, some people mightfind this to be actually a very nice start to a painting project.

And that's exactly where I find it very useful.Now you've got all of the photographic high-detail drained out of it, you can goin and start using this as a basis to paint on.And because you've already bled that high-frequency out of the image, it'shighly unlikely that as you start painting this, it's going to stay too close toa photographic image.And the result will be a painting that looks much more as if it were paintedfrom a blank canvas onward, rather than, oh I started with a photograph and Iended up with this painting.

So be sure you take advantage of Smart Blur's capability for draining thathigh-frequency information out of an image, particularly a photograph.

Q: When I double-click the John's Smart Brushes.brushcategory file as shown in the Chapter 8 movie "Understanding the Underpainting palette," the brushes do not install. Instead I get the message "There is no application set to open this document."

A: This is because your operating system does not recognize the .brushcategory file type. This can be circumvented by selecting the file, right-clicking, and choosing "Open With…".

If Painter 12 is not in the list, use "Other…" to locate and select Painter 12.

The file will be read by Painter and the brush category will be installed.

Sorry, there are no matches for your search "" —to search again, type in another word or phrase and click search.

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